How much does all that water weigh compared with what a 747 could carry?
24,000 gallons of water weighs just shy of 200,000 pounds. A quick glance at the technical specs for the 747 says that the maximum payload capacity of a 747-400 cargo freighter is 244,000 pounds.
I'm never going to escape from this thread, am I?;)
In that case, the market corrects itself. If there are too many imaging places, and not enough patients to use them, they'll shut down and the number of expensive medical machines will drop. That doesn't hurt me either way, because I didn't pay for the thing in the first place - unlike in countries where the state pays for medical technology.
Welcome to the aging of the industrial world - everyone's costs are going up, and there is no preventative care that can forestall getting old. Now, if you want to propose implementing the carousel system from "Logan's Run" for the elderly, I'm listening, but short of that, everyone's going to get squeezed - and the bigger the social safety net is in a given nation, the more it's going to hurt. And the Canadians have a big one.
You'd be on to something if all those MRIs and CAT scanners were sitting around gathering dust, but they're not - all those imaging places aren't opening up because they expect to have zero business. Widespread availability makes what used to be exotic and expensive imagery almost commonplace any more, to the point where an MRI is not much more unusual than a simple x-ray. Given the diagnostic value of such things, I say bring 'em on - make MRIs as exotic as dental floss, as far as I'm concerned. The price can only go down, and the quality of care can only go up, the more widespread it becomes.
But even if you were right, let's look at it from the perspective of a potential patient for a moment. From that perspective, which do you suppose is better - to have an MRI and not need it, or to need an MRI and not have it? Be sure to poll the Canadians as they cross the border for their thoughts....
I can't see why you'd bother either, but there you go. As for my tone, I thought I was being rather mild - next time, I'll try to keep in mind that I'm dealing with a bit of a hothouse flower who doesn't care to have his worldview challenged....
Generics aren't available for everydrug, and generics don't always have the same QC
Not available for every drug, but enough to make a significant difference for most people, even when compared to Canadian prices. QC, on the other hand, is a non-starter - all pharmaceuticals, generic and brand-name, are subject to the same regulations in their manufacture.
Translation for US'ers: The Frasier Institute is about the same as the US's "Heritage Foundation" and such, a right-wing think tank. I'll believe their position papers as much as I'd trust the Cato Institute.
general_re, glad you found someone who agrees with your position but it's not mainstream and neither from an unbiased source or one with a great deal of creditability.
In other words, you can't refute the material, so you'll attack the source. Nice ad hominem - I hope, for your sake, that you're right and they're wrong. But I wouldn't bet on it...
That may be so, but how many thousands here in the US can't even get that far due to lack of health insurance?
Very few. That's what Medicare and Medicaid do, remember?
They may need to outsource the health care once in awhile, but damned if they still don't get that health care.
And they're gradually going broke as a result. Sooner or later, the Canadian system will either be radically revised - including deep cuts in benefits and/or large tax increases - or it will simply collapse under its own weight. There simply won't be enough future Canadians to support the present Canadians as they age - it's the same problem that is coming in the US, except it will be worse in Canada. The writing is already on the wall - it's just a matter of time now, although it's perfectly understandable that many Canadians are in denial about it. Most Americans are too.
In Canada they step back, take a look at that bigger picture and say yeah, it makes more sense to ship some folks down south of the border to use the expensive stuff the 'Merkins bought for themselves and are now desperate for patients to justify. Sure it doesn't make for big bragging points but then universal healthcare kinda trumps the US's horribly broken system, the occasional shiny dual-phaser radiation whatsits notwithstanding.
Just keep telling yourself that...
While Canada is one of the world's top healthcare spenders, it has fallen into the bottom ranks of industrialized countries when it comes to the acquisition and use of high-tech medical equipment such as MRI and CT scanners.
According to a new study released by the Fraser Institute, a public-policy think-tank, the lack of access to advanced medical equipment could lead to poorer medical outcomes for Canadians, compared with patients in other countries.
"The failure of the medical technology infrastructure means that surgery and diagnostic procedures are delayed, and this results in declining patient health," said Dr. Bill McArthur, a practicing physician and author of the report, titled The Availability of Medical Technology in Canada: An International Comparative Study.
Canada is the fifth highest healthcare spender in the 29-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as a percentage of GDP. But it ranks twenty-first out of 28 countries in the availability of computed tomography (CT) scanners. The average accessibility among OECD nations is 12.9 CT scanners per million persons, well above Canada's 8.1 scanners per million persons.
Moreover, Canada is nineteenth out of 27 countries in making magnetic resonance image (MRI) scanners available to the public, and nineteenth out of 22 when it comes to lithotriptors (devices that use shock waves to break down kidney stones, making surgery unnecessary.)
Generally, Canada is among the bottom third of OECD nations in availability of technology, the study found. The author based his results on information from the OECD, and by comparing British Columbia with the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon. Other sources included the American Hospital Association, the B.C. Ministry of Health, various federal government agencies and interviews with 400 British Columbia physicians.
According to the report, the smaller installed-base of medical technology in Canada does not reflect a lack of demand for these services. On the contrary, there are waiting lists of weeks to months for many of the major diagnostic and treatment procedures, such as MRIs and CT scans.
The paper argues that the central problem is an insufficient supply of equipment stemming from deficiencies in Canada's healthcare system, and the way in which purchasing decisions are made, authorized and financed.
"This pervasive technology deficit points to the need for a serious re-evaluation of the way in which healthcare is funded and provided in Canada," said Dr. McArthur.
I never said the US system was "perfect" - in fact, I don't think I made any direct claims about the US system at all. Now that you mention it, though, on the "forced to send seriously ill patients to foreign countries for treatment" axis, the US is pretty clearly scoring better than Canada.;)
Republican bullshit not withstanding, the Canadian single-payer health care system works better than anything I have ever seen in the US.
Is that why the Ontario government and Princess Margaret Hospital sent more than a thousand backlogged cancer patients to Roswell Park in Buffalo - because of how well the Canadian system works?
Perhaps that's when they had an opportunity to discuss the state of North Tonawanda - on the drive down;)
One of those apparently sourceless quotes made all the more suspect by the attribution itself. The United States does not have a parliamentary system - the only "ministers" in the US are charged with church congregations. Second, the Department of Defense did not exist until 1947, and was not so named until 1949 - Newton D. Baker was Secretary of the War Department under Woodrow Wilson, from 1916 to 1921.
You proceed from the assumption that I think that visible licensing systems is a public good. I do not.
Actually, I'm starting from the initial assumption that driving anonymously is not somehow a fundamental human right. So far, I have history, the law, and your fellow citizens on my side;)
That ex-privacy Czar wrote: "In Canada, it is well established that we are not required to identify ourselves to police unless we are being arrested or we are carrying out a licensed activity such as driving.
And isn't that licensed activity (driving) exactly what we're talking about in this instance?;)
Compromising one little liberty now is going to mean more liberties are compromised later. Why not fight it when it's teeny?
But my point is that I don't think there are liberties being compromised in this particular case - you're still free to travel, and that license plate you've had all along for identification purposes is being used to identify people. That's what it's for.
A can or two a day isn't going to hurt you. Drink a case a week and you're going to have all sorts of problems.
So two cans a day is okay, but 3.4 cans a day (24 cans per case divided by 7 days) will fuck you up. Obviously, something's wrong with that last can-and-a-half, so all you have to do is not drink 2 out of every 7 cans - thus, you can buy 14 cases a week, throw 4 of them away, and you'll be fine.
If a member of the public was following you around all day, taking notes- you'd get a restraining order for stalking.
Well, except that you wouldn't, for the most part. I see the case you're trying to make here, that we're granting the government powers that we don't extend to private citizens, but the problems is, for the most part, that's not true. You won't, as a general rule, get a restraining order in such a case, because simply following you around with clipboard in hand doesn't meet the legal definition of stalking, especially if you don't know that I'm doing it. Mash here for a general overview of stalking laws, but in a nutshell, it's not stalking unless I either explicitly or implicitly threaten your personal safety, or I follow you with the intent of harrassing, annoying, or alarming you - just following you and taking notes isn't stalking, particularly if I do it surreptitiously, as I said. It's not stalking when a private citizen does what we're talking about here, and I see no reason to think that it's akin to stalking when the state does it either - it's not a helpful analogy, in the end.
And while the public at large can see "someone who looks like a Slashdot poster" walking around the mall, that public generally doesn't have the right to know your name: we don't have to wear nametags in public.
You don't have to wear a name tag, but there's nothing forbidding me from snapping your picture as you're in the food court, and then using that picture to find out more about you. That's perfectly legal for me to do, and more to the point, perfectly legal for the police to do - they do it all the time. To say that "people can look at us but they won't know us unless we've previously chosen to reveal our names to them" is not entirely accurate - more accurately, people can look at you, but they won't know you unless they choose to find out more about you. And there's a big difference between them not knowing you because you choose to be anonymous, and them not knowing you because they don't care enough about you to find out more.
Hypothetical: the police set up surveillance of a junkyard suspected of dealing in stolen auto parts, and while they do, you show up and buy parts. Even though they don't yet know who you are, they snap your picture in order to find out who you are, as part of an investigation into whether or not you're an active participant in this criminal activity.
Now, as an innocent person, you may find this alarming, but I don't see why this should be an illegitimate exercise for the police. They don't operate via crystal ball - if they could automatically and unerringly home in on only the guilty, we wouldn't be having this discussion. The very nature of police work means that you're going to encounter citizens who haven't actually done anything wrong, if for no other reason than because criminals don't live and work in criminal zones, where the only people they ever interact with are other criminals.
You've never really had "the right not to be known against [your] will" or "the right to be anonymous except when [you] choose to identify [yourself]" - those are simply not blanket "rights" that any society has ever recognized. You don't have the right to be anonymous in all circumstances unless you choose otherwise - that's why you have a license plate on the back of your car in the first place, because that right simply doesn't exist.
The person riding from New York to Boston could probably just plunk down coins to get a room and a beer: far more private than the ID and credit card we have to show now.
You can still do that now - there are plenty of hotels that will give you a room for cash, no questions asked. You may not care for the neighborhoods they're in, though;)
By then, it will be too late. This is the thin end of the wedge.
Why does the fact that I think this is not so bad now mean that I can't say that something else is bad later on? Just because we accept one thing now, how does it follow that we must also accept something else later?
Or, more generally speaking, slippery-slope arguments are bullshit, because they tend to (intentionally) set up a false dichotomy - either we don't have cameras on the streets at all, or we have them everywhere watching everyone all the time, in an Orwellian nightmare of totalitarianism. And no arrangement lying in between those two extremes is thought to be possible, for some reason.
Hey, how did you know that I'm shifty and suspicious looking? Are you watching me?;-)
Your papers, please;)
More seriously, I don't much care for this myself, and were this coming to my town, I don't know how I'd react. But then again, this isn't my town, and I think at the very least, we have to recognize that the citizens of this town have a general right to implement it if they want it - Thurston Howell and his wife are apparently the ones who have to live with it, not me. And I don't really see this coming to my town, either - the only reason this is possible down there is basically a quirk of geography, such that you can effectively monitor who drives into town is because there are only one or two ways that you can actually drive into town. Plus, the place is microscopic, population-wise, which means there probably isn't that much traffic to begin with. Neither of those things is true about my town.
And finally, that's all it is - checking to see who's entering the town, not having cameras installed all over the town to constantly monitor what everyone is up to at all times and in all places once they're there. There's a qualitative and quantitative difference between monitoring traffic in and out of town, and monitoring everyone everywhere, and I don't agree that we must rule one out simply because we don't like the other - they're two separate cases, that should be judged on their own merits or lack thereof, without fears of the other coloring our judgement unreasonably.
And they promise that, after installing all the necessary infrastructure, they won't start doing it in the future. And the government always keeps its promises.
If/when that comes to pass, consider this post your official/. "I Told You So!" voucher. In the meantime, let's deal with the situation as it actually exists, rather than trying to slay with one shot every demon we can possibly imagine.
Sure, this kind of surveillance is legal. But should it be? That is the question, and it is a good question.
Precisely. If I had a nickel for everyone who conflates the issue of how the law is with how the law should be, I'd be Bill Gates-rich;)
You do not have a right to privacy in public. But you do have a right not to be surveilled by the police without some sort of check by the judiciary.
But that's not a blanket protection against all forms of surveillance - that right isn't absolute. Generally, the judiciary only comes into play when the police want to go somewhere where you have some reasonable expectation that what you're doing is not something that the public at large is privy to - your house, your place of business, your telephone, and so forth. The police don't need a warrant from a judge to simply follow you around all day and take notes on where you go as you're out and about on your daily business. Should they? I'm not so sure - walking through the mall, your presence is obvious to anyone who cares to look, but essentially we'd be asking the police to ignore that which is directly in front of their faces.
The important question to ask about these sorts of things is not whether they are permitted by the constitution, but whether the Founding Fathers would have forbidden them if they had any idea that they were possible. With the advance of technology, it is important to reevaluate our principles frequently. I just can't imagine Jefferson, for instance, being in favor of this sort of thing. It just doesn't sound like him.
Perhaps. But I'm not so sure they would have endorsed a blanket right to what we might call "public anonymity", where one is not, say, speaking or writing anonymously - that I think they would have understood, with the probable exception of John Adams;) - but rather having anonymity retrofitted on to your actual physical presence. I don't think the concept of "disappearing in the crowd" had quite as much meaning for them then as it does for us now - the crowd was a lot smaller back then, and it was just harder to be anonymous in public. Nowadays, we enclose ourselves in our metal boxes as we travel, and like to think that the feeling of insularity that this engenders is something we're somehow entitled to. But historically speaking, that insularity never really existed as it does now - if you wanted to travel from New York to Boston in 1789, you were most likely either walking or riding a horse, but either way, your face was out there for the world to see as you did it. And even if you'd never been to Boston before, I don't think the Founders would have signed on to the notion that nobody in Boston, including the local authorities, should have the ability to find out more about you.
It may have been slower and less formal than it is now, but I have trouble believing that they would have had serious objections to the Boston authorities writing a letter to the New York authorities, one that says that a shifty, suspicious looking fellow who calls himself "freejung" and says he's from New York just showed up in town, and do you know anything about him. And that is, in essence, a background check, the nature of which is not so far removed from what we do now - the only real difference is that such inquiries are both faster and more accurate now than they were in the past, and something makes me doubt that the Founders would see speed and accuracy as inherently bad things.
Sure, give me the right away and I'll have no problem building an additional set of private roads.
"Give"? If it's that important to you, surely you're prepared to pay for it;)
Do you really think freedom of travel doesn't exist because the roads are public?
"Freedom to travel" is not the same as "right to privacy" - not even close. Just because you're not anonymous on the public roads, that doesn't mean you're not free to travel them.
Slashdot Mirror
24,000 gallons of water weighs just shy of 200,000 pounds. A quick glance at the technical specs for the 747 says that the maximum payload capacity of a 747-400 cargo freighter is 244,000 pounds.
In that case, the market corrects itself. If there are too many imaging places, and not enough patients to use them, they'll shut down and the number of expensive medical machines will drop. That doesn't hurt me either way, because I didn't pay for the thing in the first place - unlike in countries where the state pays for medical technology.
Welcome to the aging of the industrial world - everyone's costs are going up, and there is no preventative care that can forestall getting old. Now, if you want to propose implementing the carousel system from "Logan's Run" for the elderly, I'm listening, but short of that, everyone's going to get squeezed - and the bigger the social safety net is in a given nation, the more it's going to hurt. And the Canadians have a big one.
But even if you were right, let's look at it from the perspective of a potential patient for a moment. From that perspective, which do you suppose is better - to have an MRI and not need it, or to need an MRI and not have it? Be sure to poll the Canadians as they cross the border for their thoughts....
I can't see why you'd bother either, but there you go. As for my tone, I thought I was being rather mild - next time, I'll try to keep in mind that I'm dealing with a bit of a hothouse flower who doesn't care to have his worldview challenged....
Not available for every drug, but enough to make a significant difference for most people, even when compared to Canadian prices. QC, on the other hand, is a non-starter - all pharmaceuticals, generic and brand-name, are subject to the same regulations in their manufacture.
general_re, glad you found someone who agrees with your position but it's not mainstream and neither from an unbiased source or one with a great deal of creditability.
In other words, you can't refute the material, so you'll attack the source. Nice ad hominem - I hope, for your sake, that you're right and they're wrong. But I wouldn't bet on it...
I know, but I didn't want to rub salt in the wound by pointing out how much money Canadians could save by coming to the US.
Yes, that's exactly what I meant to say.
Very few. That's what Medicare and Medicaid do, remember?
They may need to outsource the health care once in awhile, but damned if they still don't get that health care.
And they're gradually going broke as a result. Sooner or later, the Canadian system will either be radically revised - including deep cuts in benefits and/or large tax increases - or it will simply collapse under its own weight. There simply won't be enough future Canadians to support the present Canadians as they age - it's the same problem that is coming in the US, except it will be worse in Canada. The writing is already on the wall - it's just a matter of time now, although it's perfectly understandable that many Canadians are in denial about it. Most Americans are too.
Just keep telling yourself that...
My advice? Stop listening to people who tell you you can vote yourself a free lunch.
I never said the US system was "perfect" - in fact, I don't think I made any direct claims about the US system at all. Now that you mention it, though, on the "forced to send seriously ill patients to foreign countries for treatment" axis, the US is pretty clearly scoring better than Canada. ;)
Is that why the Ontario government and Princess Margaret Hospital sent more than a thousand backlogged cancer patients to Roswell Park in Buffalo - because of how well the Canadian system works?
Perhaps that's when they had an opportunity to discuss the state of North Tonawanda - on the drive down ;)
One of those apparently sourceless quotes made all the more suspect by the attribution itself. The United States does not have a parliamentary system - the only "ministers" in the US are charged with church congregations. Second, the Department of Defense did not exist until 1947, and was not so named until 1949 - Newton D. Baker was Secretary of the War Department under Woodrow Wilson, from 1916 to 1921.
Yeah, I know - offtopic. Whatever.
Actually, I'm starting from the initial assumption that driving anonymously is not somehow a fundamental human right. So far, I have history, the law, and your fellow citizens on my side ;)
And isn't that licensed activity (driving) exactly what we're talking about in this instance? ;)
But my point is that I don't think there are liberties being compromised in this particular case - you're still free to travel, and that license plate you've had all along for identification purposes is being used to identify people. That's what it's for.
So two cans a day is okay, but 3.4 cans a day (24 cans per case divided by 7 days) will fuck you up. Obviously, something's wrong with that last can-and-a-half, so all you have to do is not drink 2 out of every 7 cans - thus, you can buy 14 cases a week, throw 4 of them away, and you'll be fine.
Well, except that you wouldn't, for the most part. I see the case you're trying to make here, that we're granting the government powers that we don't extend to private citizens, but the problems is, for the most part, that's not true. You won't, as a general rule, get a restraining order in such a case, because simply following you around with clipboard in hand doesn't meet the legal definition of stalking, especially if you don't know that I'm doing it. Mash here for a general overview of stalking laws, but in a nutshell, it's not stalking unless I either explicitly or implicitly threaten your personal safety, or I follow you with the intent of harrassing, annoying, or alarming you - just following you and taking notes isn't stalking, particularly if I do it surreptitiously, as I said. It's not stalking when a private citizen does what we're talking about here, and I see no reason to think that it's akin to stalking when the state does it either - it's not a helpful analogy, in the end.
And while the public at large can see "someone who looks like a Slashdot poster" walking around the mall, that public generally doesn't have the right to know your name: we don't have to wear nametags in public.
You don't have to wear a name tag, but there's nothing forbidding me from snapping your picture as you're in the food court, and then using that picture to find out more about you. That's perfectly legal for me to do, and more to the point, perfectly legal for the police to do - they do it all the time. To say that "people can look at us but they won't know us unless we've previously chosen to reveal our names to them" is not entirely accurate - more accurately, people can look at you, but they won't know you unless they choose to find out more about you. And there's a big difference between them not knowing you because you choose to be anonymous, and them not knowing you because they don't care enough about you to find out more.
Hypothetical: the police set up surveillance of a junkyard suspected of dealing in stolen auto parts, and while they do, you show up and buy parts. Even though they don't yet know who you are, they snap your picture in order to find out who you are, as part of an investigation into whether or not you're an active participant in this criminal activity.
Now, as an innocent person, you may find this alarming, but I don't see why this should be an illegitimate exercise for the police. They don't operate via crystal ball - if they could automatically and unerringly home in on only the guilty, we wouldn't be having this discussion. The very nature of police work means that you're going to encounter citizens who haven't actually done anything wrong, if for no other reason than because criminals don't live and work in criminal zones, where the only people they ever interact with are other criminals.
You've never really had "the right not to be known against [your] will" or "the right to be anonymous except when [you] choose to identify [yourself]" - those are simply not blanket "rights" that any society has ever recognized. You don't have the right to be anonymous in all circumstances unless you choose otherwise - that's why you have a license plate on the back of your car in the first place, because that right simply doesn't exist.
The person riding from New York to Boston could probably just plunk down coins to get a room and a beer: far more private than the ID and credit card we have to show now.
You can still do that now - there are plenty of hotels that will give you a room for cash, no questions asked. You may not care for the neighborhoods they're in, though ;)
Why does the fact that I think this is not so bad now mean that I can't say that something else is bad later on? Just because we accept one thing now, how does it follow that we must also accept something else later?
Or, more generally speaking, slippery-slope arguments are bullshit, because they tend to (intentionally) set up a false dichotomy - either we don't have cameras on the streets at all, or we have them everywhere watching everyone all the time, in an Orwellian nightmare of totalitarianism. And no arrangement lying in between those two extremes is thought to be possible, for some reason.
Your papers, please ;)
More seriously, I don't much care for this myself, and were this coming to my town, I don't know how I'd react. But then again, this isn't my town, and I think at the very least, we have to recognize that the citizens of this town have a general right to implement it if they want it - Thurston Howell and his wife are apparently the ones who have to live with it, not me. And I don't really see this coming to my town, either - the only reason this is possible down there is basically a quirk of geography, such that you can effectively monitor who drives into town is because there are only one or two ways that you can actually drive into town. Plus, the place is microscopic, population-wise, which means there probably isn't that much traffic to begin with. Neither of those things is true about my town.
And finally, that's all it is - checking to see who's entering the town, not having cameras installed all over the town to constantly monitor what everyone is up to at all times and in all places once they're there. There's a qualitative and quantitative difference between monitoring traffic in and out of town, and monitoring everyone everywhere, and I don't agree that we must rule one out simply because we don't like the other - they're two separate cases, that should be judged on their own merits or lack thereof, without fears of the other coloring our judgement unreasonably.
If/when that comes to pass, consider this post your official /. "I Told You So!" voucher. In the meantime, let's deal with the situation as it actually exists, rather than trying to slay with one shot every demon we can possibly imagine.
Sure. The problem is, there seems to be a bit of disagreement about what constitutes "spying" ;)
Precisely. If I had a nickel for everyone who conflates the issue of how the law is with how the law should be, I'd be Bill Gates-rich ;)
You do not have a right to privacy in public. But you do have a right not to be surveilled by the police without some sort of check by the judiciary.
But that's not a blanket protection against all forms of surveillance - that right isn't absolute. Generally, the judiciary only comes into play when the police want to go somewhere where you have some reasonable expectation that what you're doing is not something that the public at large is privy to - your house, your place of business, your telephone, and so forth. The police don't need a warrant from a judge to simply follow you around all day and take notes on where you go as you're out and about on your daily business. Should they? I'm not so sure - walking through the mall, your presence is obvious to anyone who cares to look, but essentially we'd be asking the police to ignore that which is directly in front of their faces.
The important question to ask about these sorts of things is not whether they are permitted by the constitution, but whether the Founding Fathers would have forbidden them if they had any idea that they were possible. With the advance of technology, it is important to reevaluate our principles frequently. I just can't imagine Jefferson, for instance, being in favor of this sort of thing. It just doesn't sound like him.
Perhaps. But I'm not so sure they would have endorsed a blanket right to what we might call "public anonymity", where one is not, say, speaking or writing anonymously - that I think they would have understood, with the probable exception of John Adams ;) - but rather having anonymity retrofitted on to your actual physical presence. I don't think the concept of "disappearing in the crowd" had quite as much meaning for them then as it does for us now - the crowd was a lot smaller back then, and it was just harder to be anonymous in public. Nowadays, we enclose ourselves in our metal boxes as we travel, and like to think that the feeling of insularity that this engenders is something we're somehow entitled to. But historically speaking, that insularity never really existed as it does now - if you wanted to travel from New York to Boston in 1789, you were most likely either walking or riding a horse, but either way, your face was out there for the world to see as you did it. And even if you'd never been to Boston before, I don't think the Founders would have signed on to the notion that nobody in Boston, including the local authorities, should have the ability to find out more about you.
It may have been slower and less formal than it is now, but I have trouble believing that they would have had serious objections to the Boston authorities writing a letter to the New York authorities, one that says that a shifty, suspicious looking fellow who calls himself "freejung" and says he's from New York just showed up in town, and do you know anything about him. And that is, in essence, a background check, the nature of which is not so far removed from what we do now - the only real difference is that such inquiries are both faster and more accurate now than they were in the past, and something makes me doubt that the Founders would see speed and accuracy as inherently bad things.
"Give"? If it's that important to you, surely you're prepared to pay for it ;)
Do you really think freedom of travel doesn't exist because the roads are public?
"Freedom to travel" is not the same as "right to privacy" - not even close. Just because you're not anonymous on the public roads, that doesn't mean you're not free to travel them.
Fortunately, that's not what they're doing, in this case.